


Freedom ('tis the rising of the moon)

by jamlocked



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Actual Murder, Folklore, Implied Murder, M/M, Masturbation, What's in a name anyway?, fairytales - Freeform, family stuff, hints of fae
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 23:04:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13798200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamlocked/pseuds/jamlocked
Summary: 'They’re circling each other like sharks. Walking away, then pulling back; twin stars in orbit, swirling towards their mutual end.'





	Freedom ('tis the rising of the moon)

 

 

 

The boy is staring again. He does nothing but stare in silence, those brown eyes too big for his pinched face, too deep for a lad of three. She could look into those eyes and fall, she thinks. Fall into the depths of god knows what, because what lives in there doesn’t belong here. This is a good Christian household. It’s clean. It’s _right_.

She sweeps her long, blonde hair over her shoulder, lights a cigarette and pretends she’s not scared. ‘Feckin’ wee changeling,’ she mutters, and goes to find the old Hoover her mam gave her when she got married. It whines and rattles something fierce, a second-hand gift from a poor old woman who still wanted to give a token. Something to show she cared. Or to be rid of her. She doesn’t know. She’s just grateful the thing makes enough noise to drown out the things she thinks when she looks at the boy. The _boy_. Her son. Her third son. Why did she have to have sons?

The boy watches her even when she’s gone. He stays under the kitchen table, peering out. But even in the next room, hiding behind the noise, she knows those eyes are following every move she makes.

 

*

 

James Moriarty, king of the underworld, stands at the top of the highest building in Dubai. The tallest building in the world. There is only a thin sheet of glass between him and the sky, and he spreads his arms to the sun as it bleeds across the blue; blood red and orange, blazing the wrath of heaven down on the earth, on this one man who waits for it to fill him with its glory. He is brighter than any star. Redder than any sun. He is twenty-two years old, and as untouchable as God Himself.

‘Sebastian,’ he says and closes his eyes, smiling at the grunt of acknowledgement. He smells cigarette smoke. A filthy habit. ‘I own the world.’

There’s not a lot that can be said to that. It’s a statement that sits. It simply _is_.

James Moriarty owns the world.

 

*

 

The two other boys are older. They’re called James. One is blond and tall, with thick hair like honey. One is white, a baby’s platinum locks not yet faded to normality. He’ll be mousy, plain, forgettable. The third is also called James, and his hair is black as a raven’s wing. His eyes…she can’t look at his eyes. She stared into them when he was born, and felt their pull. It wasn’t love – though of course it was, and is, she tells herself. He’s her son. They’re her boys. She’d die for any one of them, she _would,_ (she will), and that’s the truth she offers up to God every single week in confession, sometimes twice a week, three times at Easter ( _I do love him, I do, forgive me Father I love my boys. But…_ )

But.

She smokes, looking out of the tiny back window onto a tiny back garden that her oldest mows every other weekend in the summer. Mows. You could take nail scissors to the patch and be done in an hour. She watches people walk past the alley at the back of the terrace, and thinks of Cork. Mountains, moorlands, _space_. She thinks of Uncle Gerry’s fishing cottage up at Malin Head in Donegal, looking over the sea. She’d stood at Banba’s Crown as a wee girl, hearing her grandmammy’s voice telling her the story of Queen Banbha being the first to set her foot on Ireland. Queen Banbha and her laughing troop of faery hosts.

She had thought it a fine, fine thing to be queen of the fae. Imagine holding them in your sway, sending them right and left to do as you liked, and never having to pick up a brush or pot again. Just imagine what they could do, those magic wee things.

‘Mammy?’ says a little voice that strikes a chill through her heart. Her cigarette pauses on its way to her mouth. She wonders how long cancer would take to kill her.

‘Yes, darlin’?’

‘Sebastian won’t play with me.’

She swallows with a dry throat. Too much smoking. Not a tumour in sight.

‘Well, maybe his mam wants him today. Why don’t you ask your brothers?’

‘I don’t like my brothers.’

She whirls, gripped by fury. ‘You’re a feckin’ wee _shite_ -‘ but then pulls up short at the lack of surprise her outburst causes in him. The knowledge it’s what he expected of her all along. Maybe what he wanted.

She pushes her hair back, and raises her cigarette with a shaking hand. ‘G’on along now, Jimmy. I’ve to get ready for Mass.’

He leaves without a word. She turns back to the window. She wonders how much praying it will take for this to be made right. What she did to deserve it. If there’s anything she can do except die, to be free.

 

*

 

Sherlock Holmes is a fae boy. Jim has no doubts. His angles are hidden under baby fat, but nothing can hide the sharp blue of those eyes, or the cheekbones that are going to be _ridiculous_. Jim watches from afar, sometimes transfixed, sometimes with his hand inside his pants, unable to be anything but earthbound for the few minutes it takes for Sherlock to make him grunt, and release him. He always laughs afterwards, and sometimes licks his palm.

‘You’ve never made me do that, Sebastian.’

Sebastian always goes red when he says it, which is why he says it. Jim knows very well Sebastian would do anything, _anything_ for Jim to touch him like that. He’d rob. He’d kill. He’d eat a person. He wants so desperately to be free upon this earth, running with Jim and not caring about anything, anyone, any _time_. He wants to read people like people read the alphabet; automatically, reeling off their order and worth, putting each one in their place without a second thought.

But he can’t do any of those things. Only Jim can. Jim is free.

…and maybe Sherlock Holmes. He doesn’t know yet. He’ll see.

‘The thing is, Sebastian-‘ Jim sits cross-legged, as comfortable on a tree branch as he is on a sofa, bending the world so it fits him, ‘-the thing is, you’re stupid.’

And he is. Sebastian Moran, fourth of seven, smack in the middle of three brothers and three sisters. Product of a British Army man – not even an officer, just a squaddie, just a man too stupid not to get caught shagging one of the Prod girls in a village in South Armagh when he was supposed to be going home to his wife. The Prod girl worked for the Army and was pregnant. They moved over the border to escape the ‘Ra coming for them, not that they ever moved out from under _that_ cloud. Not after Sebastian’s dad was found eight years later with a bullet through each elbow, both kneecaps, and his eyes taken from his head. Seb was eight when it happened. He found the body. He’s been Jim’s everything ever since.

‘You are. You’re _really_ stupid. You and I will never be like me and Sherlock. But that doesn’t mean you’re not coming with me.’

The thing is, Jim knows Seb will come with him everywhere. He came with him today, didn’t he? They’re not supposed to be in England. They’re supposed to be in Dublin, playing at a friend’s house that Jim fabricated for the purpose. They were supposed to be home ten minutes ago, but Jim will get them out of trouble when they make it back. He always does. He’s not real, Jim. He can’t be. Even with his cheeks carrying the same baby fat as Sherlock; even though he doesn’t run around like Seb does, so isn’t growing natural muscle as puberty does its thing; even though he’s short, too short, still shorter than his own mother even though he’s fifteen now…even despite all these things, Jim is like a storm flaring off the sun. He is sharp, and too hot to bear. He’s a child smarter than any man, but being clever doesn’t mean anything on its own. Jim is clever, and witty, and puts on a show. Jim is dangerous. Jim is a killer. He told Sebastian all about Carl, and he knew he should be shocked but he wasn’t, at all, even a little bit. He’d nodded at the news, and Jim had looked at him like he wasn’t dirt for once. He’d looked pleased. ‘So you _do_ understand some things,’ he’d said, and Seb had nodded again, and Jim had looked like he was going to kiss him. He didn’t, but he looked like he might. It was enough.

‘You’re coming with me, Sebastian,’ he says again, and it’s not a question and it’s not a request. It simply is.

 

*

 

The king of the underworld spends a remarkable amount of time in the sky. Jim needs the space. He needs the distance. He wants fresh air and wind on his cheeks, and silence; he wants _silence_ ; he can’t bear all this _noise_. His head rages and rages, it babbles in every language, it writes in numbers, it breaks the world down to symbols and distance and time, it pulls apart everything he looks at, and hears, and sees, and _it never shuts up_. Sometimes he locks himself in a soundproof room for days at a time and stays there until the noise in his head is making him scratch his skin off his arms and neck. Someone comes and drags him out at that point – it might be Sebastian, but he can never tell when he’s that bad – and then he goes to make noise in the world to drown out the storm between his ears. Things blow up. People die. He doesn’t do it for fun, he does it because the alternative is the sort of squalling, babbling pain that is worst than agony. It’s undignified. It’s the basest of all emotion, where he can no longer pretend he belongs here and cries into a padded wall, _please Sebastian, please let me go home_. But no one ever comes to take him away when he says that, because he’s there, inside his head, therefore he is home.

‘Jim.’

‘Sebastian.’

‘You’re fucking crazy.’

Jim always laughs when he says it. Seb only says it when he means it. At the points in life when it’s undeniable. _James Moriarty, you are insane_. And Jim will nod his head, bobbing it like his neck is on a spring, and he’ll try to swallow his laughter and his broken sobs, and he says, ‘yes. I know.’

The thing is, he doesn’t belong here. The world is not built for people like him. It’s never going to be able to keep up, and he needs to get rid of it and its dirt, and its awful, mind-numbing banality. He needs to be gone, deep underground, back to where he belongs.

 

*

 

‘Mammy?’

‘What is it, darlin’?’

‘Daniel’s done something on my bed.’

She sits up, blinking a broken sleep from her eyes. Her youngest son is a foot away, standing patiently by the side of her bed like he’s been there a while. His hand is pure white, and resting on the edge of her mattress. Her skin wants to crawl off her bones in the opposite direction, and leap out of the window; the hand looks like it might reach out, grab, dig its tiny fingernails into her throat. Drag her back into the earth from where they all came.

‘What’s he done on your bed, Jimmy?’

‘I don’t know. It’s wet.’

James Daniel is ten. He’s never been a bed wetter. He’s her big strong wee man; the sportsman, no big brain on him, poor thing, but a nicer lad you couldn’t meet. Not one for nerves, or night terrors.

‘What was he doin’ in your room, Jimmy?’

‘He was telling me a story, mam.’

‘What was he telling you a story about?’

‘About the babies that go away. He told me about how they disappear.’

She can’t swallow anymore. Her throat is dry as a long-buried bone, and maybe that tumour has come for her after all, because there’s a lump in her gullet that’s never going to move.

‘Stop it, Jimmy. Sure it’s only a story.’

‘He said that’s why you call me a changeling. Because I don’t belong here.’

‘Jimmy-‘

‘He told me about the other boy-‘

The slap rings through the room, the house, the world. A tiny body hits the floor without a sound, and teeth rip through her mind and snarl, biting for her swollen throat as she screams and screams in silence, frozen solid and locked in place, terror at her own hand breaking the last of her into pieces.

Jimmy gets up off the floor. His big brown eyes are dry, unsurprised, dead.

‘He’s done something on my bed,’ he says again, calm. ‘I’m going to sleep in his.’

She watches him leave the room. His other hand is trailing a teddy bear, it’s legs dragging along the carpet. She hadn’t noticed that before. Where did he get it? She has no idea.

 

*

 

Daniel had done something on Jimmy’s bed. It was wet.

And sticky.

It never came out of the sheets. The mattress had to be burned. She set fire to it herself the day after the funeral, sobbing into the smoke and standing far too close, so the neighbours hopped over the fence and pulled her clear. They called an ambulance and she went away for a while. A long while. David and Jimmy went to England to live with their dad, a man who’d had the sense to leave a month after his youngest arrived in the world. But he couldn’t get away this time. He owed her that much.

‘The thing is boys,’ their father says to them, a week after they arrive in Sussex. ‘I’ve been gone too long and whatever I say to you, you’re not going to listen. I understand that. I don’t blame you. So, look – you go to school and you do your work. I’ll buy all your things, and you’ll always have a roof over your head. You’re big lads now. You know what’s best for yourself. I won’t get in your way.’

David says nothing. Jimmy looks around the dingy front room, where everything appears to be beige. He’s not a big lad. He’s six, and very small.

‘I want to go home,’ he says. ‘I want Sebastian.’

‘You’re not going home,’ says their father, in a far less congenial tone. ‘Your mother’s in the loony bin. It’s you two and me, now.’ It takes this long for the man’s brain to catch up with his ears. ‘Who’s Sebastian?’

David looks at the carpet. Jimmy stares through the man he’s supposed to call ‘dad’, and thinks about Dublin. He thinks about mountains, moorlands, _space_ he’s never seen. He thinks about Sebastian.

‘No one,’ he mutters, and no more is said on the matter. He doesn’t see Seb for six months, by which time their mother is released from hospital and tells anyone who’ll listen she doesn’t want her boys back, she doesn’t, she _can’t_. But they step off the boat anyway, a suitcase in each hand, and she’s there to meet them with a trembling smile on lips wearing too much colour. Jimmy wanted to go home, after all. Jimmy knows how to get what he wants.

‘Where’s Sebastian?’ he says, the minute they get through the door of the new house. His mother lets out a sob, and he turns to her with a scowl on his face. ‘Where is he?’

‘Well, uh-‘ she smooths her hair back. Her hands are much thinner now. ‘It’s two miles to the old house, Jimmy. He won’t be able to just pop by anymore. Maybe make some new friends?’

The look he gives her makes her run from the room. He spends all night awake, wondering if that’s true. Sebastian is very stupid. Maybe he won’t be able to figure out the buses without Jim to do it for him. Maybe he’ll get lost and get driven round and around Dublin forever, never knowing which stop to get off at. That would be funny, wouldn’t it?

It turns out he needn’t have worried. The doorbell rings at 7am, and Jim answers it. Sebastian is taller than he used to be. He’s a skinny thing of seven, but not as skinny as Jim. He’s blond and blue-eyed, and the most beautiful thing Jim has seen in his life thus far. He has bruises and scars – most of them bestowed by Jim – and is perfect.

‘You’re so _stupid_ ,’ Jim tells him. And Sebastian nods. Six months apart don’t change that sort of truth. He’ll always be stupid. He just is.

 

*

 

The thing is, Jim is in pain. It’s his father’s funeral and he wants to cry. Outside, there is nothing; inside he is raging at the walls of his own body, clawing the tissue and blood vessels off arteries and bones, ripping himself apart from the inside out. Piece by piece, flaking under the cruelty of his own touch, his lungs bursting and air trapped in the cavity left behind, threatening to explode his heart. He can’t breathe, and can’t move. He is screaming, and screaming, and screaming.

‘Jimmy?’

He looks up. A tray loaded with sausage rolls, cheese and pineapple on sticks, beetroot and feta cubes is held out to him. Beetroot and feta. Purple bleeding into the purest white. The tray is put into his hands.

‘Make sure you offer it to everyone. Don’t miss anyone out.’

Jim wants to vomit on the food, then take the cocktail sticks and find better things to skewer than cubes of cheese. He walks around the room, pausing here and there while people open their mouths and say things he doesn’t listen to. He lip-reads one person saying _poor young man, he’s in shock_ , and there comes a vision of him murdering the man with a sliver of sharp wood, a piece of cheese stuck to the end. It’s so strong, Jim has to blink and focus to make sure he hasn’t done it.

He does not miss his father. He is not sad he’s dead. But how _dare_ he die before Jim had made up his mind whether to kill him or not. How dare he. He leans on the garage wall later, his tie loose and his hair dishevelled, breathing hard while some cousin or other gets off his knees and disappears into the house without daring to make eye contact. Jim takes half a cigarette off Seb, who had stayed silent through the whole thing. Hurt comes off him in waves, harder than the bulge in his trousers. Jim doesn’t bother looking at him.

‘Shut up,’ he says, flatly. ‘You know how this works.’

Seb doesn’t have to like it. He just has to endure. He can leave if he wants to, but they both know that’ll never happen. Jim is the key to this earth, he is Seb’s wind and air, his one point of contact with what might have been. He has to stay close. He will never leave his side. Jim smiles as he tosses the butt of the cigarette away, and fastens the button on his trousers.

‘Let’s go and see Sherlock,’ he says, and Seb can do nothing but agree.

 

*

 

When he said he owned the world, he wasn’t exaggerating. James Moriarty has the director of the CIA in his pocket. He has dirt on the head of MI5 _and_ MI6 – and incidentally, he knows the one weak point of the man who really runs the British government; he holds enough terror cells and political allies in Palestine and Israel to broker peace in the region if he felt like it (or make the whole place explode); he has access to North Korea’s nuclear facilities, and he knows every single filthy little secret the Chinese government is hiding from the west. He could, quite literally, start World War III.

The most beautiful thing about it is that none of them know how much power he has. Every individual who knows he exists knows that _they’re_ fucked, but they think they’re the only one. Therefore, if they shut up and do what Moriarty says, there’s a chance no one else will find out. The only exception is Mycroft Holmes, because of course he’s an exception. But even he doesn’t know how far it goes and is new to the name Moriarty himself. He’ll learn, when Jim wants him to. Not before. In the meantime, Holmes will say nothing. If everyone involved realised how screwed everyone else is, the resulting clusterfuck could exceed even Jim’s wildest expectations.

He puts a hand on the glass that separates him from the sky. From the earth. From the sun. The red is fading now, and stars are starting to appear. Soon, it will be dark.

‘Sebastian,’ he says, softly. And Seb comes to stand next to him, as tall as Jim is short, as blond as he is dark. Their arms touch, no more. ‘We can’t go out there. The sun only shines on beautiful things.’

Seb thinks Jim is the most beautiful thing the world has ever seen. But Seb knows what Jim _really_ is, where he really belongs. He is a thing of the dark, something that should never have been. An ugly child to replace the beautiful one snatched in the night. A black soul to replace a pretty face.

He’d say he’s sorry, but what good would that do? Jim would still be stuck here. There is no way for him to leave.

‘You’re so stupid, Sebastian.’

This is true. Stupid, and beautiful.

‘Maybe I’ll touch you when I’m dead. Can you wait that long?’

Maybe. Obviously. He has no choice. Jim closes his eyes, and rests his forehead on the glass. The sun sinks behind the sea, slipping into another world. Only the dark is left behind.

 

*

 

Sherlock Holmes. A fae boy who hid from his brain, and now just a fey man. Jim watches him with eyes growing dim, a spirit too tired to burn any longer. Jim is a bolt of lightning encased in human flesh, and if he can’t quite put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes, his name can circle it a thousand times, ten thousand, a million in that time. Thank god for technology. Thank god for the news. His existence, he feels, is growing to a close but his name may just live forever.

‘Look at him,’ he says to Sebastian, who has long since started facing away whenever the middle Holmes child turns up on one of Jim’s screens. ‘He’s not even looking for me.’

They both know Sherlock is waiting. They all know Jim has to be the one to reveal himself. Sherlock will never find him on his own, and could never guess what’s coming. His own brain has tricked him into forgetting years of his life, so he has no chance in hell against Jim Moriarty and he’s too interested to see what the game will be to try and avoid it. He’s just like Jim in that respect. He’d rather play than anything.

‘Shall I send him a reminder, do you think? So he knows I haven’t forgotten him?’

Seb thinks Jim will do exactly as he pleases no matter what. This earns him a laugh.

‘Yes, you’re right. Even stupid boys can be right once in their lives.’

Seb puts his hands in his jeans’ pockets, and leans against the wall. Jim looks at him when he stands like this. He licks his lips every time. Seb knows the posture shows off his narrow waist and broad shoulders, and Jim has always been a sucker for a man strong enough to hold him down. It makes the price of his submission so much sweeter in the end. Seb once asked him why the man who owned the world would let anyone treat him the way they do. Jim had looked at him with emulated pity in his eyes, because he cannot manufacture the real thing.

‘They’re convinced they own me. It just lets me own them. Do you not see, Sebastian?’ Jim had climbed on to his lap, and ground down. ‘The more you want, the more you’re mine. Do you understand that, at least?’

He understands that better than anything in the world. He yearns towards Jim. He’s a broken flower in a dark place that stretches towards the light, knowing it could heal him if he just reaches far enough. But the light dances away, laughing, always present but never close enough to do good. Seb can’t stop reaching, and Jim can’t leave him behind. He called them brothers, once. Seb does not think he meant it.

Jim turns away from the pose against the wall, and goes back to staring at Sherlock. He traces a cheekbone with his fingertip. He tries to smile, but only manages to look sad. ‘He’s so beautiful,’ he says. ‘And so boring.’

Sherlock was never supposed to be boring. Sherlock has friends now. Sherlock is a nobody, and Jim is going to have to leave him behind. He thinks he might leave the world a ruin when he does, because nothing should survive the power of James Moriarty’s wrath.

 

*

 

She lights another cigarette. Her hand shakes as much as it ever did, but now it does it all the time and not just when the boy is in the room. Her hair is as blonde as ever. She is tall and blue-eyed to this day. Even though she’s much older, she’s of average age by normal standards. She had her children young. She is far too young to die.

‘Mam. You need to move.’

She shakes her head. David is ten feet away, trying to sound calm through his tears. His hair did turn mousy, and it’s thinning at an alarming rate. Maybe that would have happened to Daniel if he’d lived. Maybe he wouldn’t be her big strong wee man any more.

‘Please, Mam. It doesn’t have to be you.’

But it does have to be her. That’s why they’re here. David is the only thing that would have induced their mother to join this family scene, so David is what he used. The boy. Jimmy. The little one with the dark eyes and black hair; the one that makes her heart go tight and cold whenever he looks at her. Today is no different. It’s worse. She watches him watching them, and knows he has no idea how he came from her. She feels the same way. He’s not hers. He can’t be.

She drops her fag end into a teacup. It sizzles in the dregs and floats there, bearing the red of her lipstick around the filter. Jimmy has his hands in his pockets, his head cocked to the side as though he’s listening. His suit probably cost more than this flat. He is a sliver of black in a dingy brown room, too dark to belong anywhere.

‘Come on then, Jimmy,’ she says, in a tone far more calm than she feels. ‘We all know what you’re here for. But you’ll let him go.’

Jim’s head tilts further. His expression is almost _cute_ with those enormous eyes and gentle smile, quizzical, as though he’s a puppy being shown how to listen to the humans by his mum.

‘You will. You’re not here for Davy.’

‘I might be,’ he says. His accent is not rough like it used to be. He learned to speak as though he was from somewhere else, it seems. Somewhere with more money. ‘I might be here for you both.’

‘But you’re not,’ she says firmly, as though tone of voice has ever made a difference to him. ‘I’ll not lose another son to the likes of _you_. You’ve taken them all but him. You’ll not get him now.’

Jim looks to the side, giving every indication of listening to someone talk. It goes on and on, and silence falls over David’s awful front room. She turns to look at him eventually, and Davy looks like he’s about to explain when Jim snaps back into the moment.

‘Sebastian,’ he says, and his voice is so even he might be remarking on the weather. ‘Kill him.’

A light appears on David’s forehead. She feels the scream trapped in her throat, the same one that’s been there for nineteen years, the day she first looked into little Jimmy’s enormous brown eyes. ‘You’ll _not_ ,’ she says, chokes, and she has time enough to see the corner of his mouth turn up as she flings herself backwards towards her second son.

‘I will,’ she hears, soft as new snow, and it’s those brown eyes she’s staring into as the noise catches up to the bullet; she hears the _crack_ from a mile away though it’s no more than a gentle pop by the time it reaches them. She has time to realise he’s smiling in satisfaction and that he’s won somehow, this is what he _wanted_ , and then the lead hits her square between her eyes, and she is finally, fatally, free.

Everything is very quiet once she’s fallen. For a moment, at least. Jim rolls his eyes up to David’s white face, flecked with red. The city waits, holding its breath.

‘Oh _dear_.’ He murmurs it as the air around them starts to gather, drawing up towards them and forming into something big, something powerful, something _angry_.

‘You’re so _stupid._ ’

Jim winces as the words leave his mouth, as if there’s been a loud noise. David watches in horror.

‘You’re insane,’ he whispers, and watches his one remaining brother sigh. ‘Still talking to your imaginary friend. Just kill me, Jimmy. I don’t want to be alive if you are.’

Jim looks at him as if he can’t understand why he’s still there. It’s possible he’d forgotten he was. ‘You shouldn’t talk to your brother that way,’ he says. ‘It upsets him.’

He turns on his heel. He clicks his fingers. The air relaxes, and he is gone.

 

*

 

James Moriarty was never given a middle name. He was the only one who simply _was_. He used to think they’d just run out of imagination by then, but it became obvious that wasn’t true.

‘Really,’ he says, sitting in a chair in a plain room, taking up all the air in the universe. ‘I don’t understand what you’re so angry about.’

Seb is beyond anger. His rage is incandescent, and Jim breathes it in like mana from heaven, letting it thrill over his nerves, his cock hard as iron.

‘She was useless.’

But she was his mother. Tricking her into catching the bullet wasn’t fair. He would never have pulled the trigger. Jim actually _moans_ when he says it, shifting against the seam of his trousers.

‘Stop it. You’re going to make me come.’

Seb stands over him. Jim’s eyes are closed, pleasure pulling his lips into a smile, a tiny flush of heat colouring his cheekbones. ‘You’re not going away. You can’t. You don’t mean…oh god, stop it Sebastian. _Stop_ it, I can’t-‘

Seb watches him jerk in place, a dark stain spreading over his crotch, three months’ worth of neglected pleasure ruining the perfect wool of his suit.  He watches the slow lick over a dry lower lip, the pull of that chest, the way his fingers twitch when his body tries to contain the aftershocks. How many times has he dreamt of holding him through this part? Even now, he longs for it. He stretches white fingers towards that face, only for them to freeze in the air.

‘Don’t you dare.’ Jim’s voice is even again, calm. He opens his eyes, and they’re dead once more. ‘And don’t tell me you’re leaving again.’

For the first time since his life was taken, Seb wonders what it would be like to be free. Not upon the earth with Jim. Free _of_ Jim. Free in the place in which he lives, where everything is dark and beautiful, and there are no other people. Free in the world he was taken to, all those years ago.

‘You’re insane,’ he says, and the words reverberate where anyone can hear them, making Jim laugh as he always does.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘And I’m talking to my imaginary friend. Isn’t that right, Sebastian?’

He doesn’t know anymore. He doesn’t care. It all hurts too much. He knows it’s because Jim hurts too much. There is nothing but pain any more.

‘Stop it,’ he hears again, and there’s no sign of pleasure this time. ‘We’re not done yet. And you, my dear, are not going _anywhere_.’

He’s right, of course. Seb is not going anywhere.

 

*

 

Sherlock Holmes. Fae boy, fey man, and now simply human. Jim thinks back to the day that mother died – someone’s mother, not _his_ mother, surely – and the way Sebastian had cared. And the way Sherlock had cared when John Watson wore a bomb vest, and he wants to rip the world open with his claws because they care and he can’t, won’t, doesn’t know how to. He is free of such nonsense, and can almost believe it except it all hurts so much. He has been yelling into a padded wall for two days, and not even Sebastian is coming to pull him out this time. He has to hurt himself too much before Seb moves anymore, and it’s all the worse because the injuries are not where any normal person can see. On the outside, he looks whole. Inside, he is shreds. Ribbons of broken lives streaming through whistling air, too far gone to ever sew back together. He could use glue, maybe. Patchwork himself like a harlequin, leaving all those weak joins to be hit by the right person, shattering him, leaving him pieces.

‘Sherlock,’ he whispers into a wall, and feels Seb standing over him at last. He laughs. Seb takes a cigarette out of his pocket, and lights it. A filthy habit.

‘Let’s go and see Sherlock.’

Anything you want, Seb says. His tone is quiet. Soon, Jim thinks, he won’t be able to hear him at all. Won’t hurt him anymore, his erstwhile brother. The boy who should have lived.

‘I’ll never say sorry.’

Seb says nothing. He doesn’t need to. Jim will never say sorry, and Seb would never expect him to. It wasn’t his fault anyway. Neither of them asked to be born. ‘Let’s go and see Sherlock,’ he says, and Jim nods, and pulls himself to his feet. There is a mark on his neck, nail tracks scratched into his arms. Everything will be covered by whichever suit he chooses, because the outside world will never know what James Moriarty really is, or why he is, or what has happened.

‘I’m not going to kill him. He’s not interesting enough to kill.’

What Jim means, Seb thinks, is that Sherlock has not hurt him enough yet. Jim has never known anything but the dark, and while he understands the light on an intellectual level, he will never feel what Sherlock does. He will never have that connection with another person. If he does, he will die. The need for it will kill him. He will never be able to sustain such a thing.

‘Stop thinking. You’re too stupid to think.’

Seb looks down into his eyes. Those impossible big brown eyes, too deep to ever be human. ‘Will you take me when you go?’

Jim smiles. ‘What do you think, Sebastian?’

Seb thinks Jim will leave him in the dark. That he will cut him loose and let him die from lack of light. That Jim will not give it a second thought.

 

*

 

James Moriarty, king of the underworld, stands on a different rooftop this time. It is not the tallest one in the world; it is not even the tallest one in London. It is not hot, and there is no devil’s sunset to turn the blue to blood.

But there is no glass separating him from the sky. When he opens his arms this time, there is nothing to stop him being filled with glory; a different kind, a _new_ kind, and something he could never get from Sebastian.

He has to acknowledge this as he watches from a place too far away to see, and to close to bear. Jim. His Jim. His wind and air. The feral boy with the big wide eyes, killing the world he never belonged to in the first place. _Stay_ , he whispers, but Jim is too far gone to hear him now. He is listening to Sherlock’s words instead, a mind as wide as the sky and deep as the sea, a mind Jim can lose himself in and not hurt anymore. Someone like him, a face he can recognise in the mirror. A spirit that flares.

 _Stay_ , he whispers, even though he shouldn’t. Even though it’s cruel. He learned that from the best. _Stay_.

They’re circling each other like sharks. Walking away, then pulling back; twin stars in orbit, swirling towards their mutual end. Seb watches with blue eyes growing dim. His hand shakes as he puts a cigarette to his lips, knowing Jim will not smell the smoke anymore. He sees him turn one final time; stand, wait, listen. And his eyes turn soft. They turn happy. Seb hears, _you could never make me do that, Sebastian_ , and he thinks of Dublin and all the grey, the rain, the endless tears and all that blood. His mother’s dreams of Queen Banbha and her faery troop, his brothers wrestling and ignoring him as he sat in the corner. An old Hoover, and the dirt on the kitchen tiles. His father’s house in England, and Carl’s body after it was dead. Dubai, and that one day he felt the joy of what he was. That _one_ day, in a lifetime of days.

But now there’s this day. He looks up. He is bathed in blue, unsullied by red. Cleansed by the white of a smile. And there; an offer of freedom.

Jim blinks slowly, and Seb says nothing. He closes his eyes, just once, listening to the earth being quiet. And he reaches out; the first time in his life he will touch peace. No one whispers _stay_. The voice is silent, and the world underneath awaits. Leaving home or coming home, the time is right. Sherlock takes his hand, and James Moriarty is finally, fatally, free.

 

 

 

 


End file.
